sewn paper
Fiction / Stories
Fall 2000
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-219-1
$17.95
e-mail the Author
Southern Stories:
Selected Stories, Volume One
Clark Blaise
The stories collected here in Volume One are among the earliest in Blaise's forty-year publishing career. The experience of Florida - particularly the underdeveloped north-central areas close to modern Disneyfied Orlando - profoundly affected a `Yankee' child with Canadian parents. The Florida Blaise describes is little-changed since the Civil War.
The stories in this volume trace a young writer's journey towards his life's work. By the close of his Florida experience, he has discovered a way of integrating his Canadian, and especially his French-Canadian, background into a sub-tropical foreground.
Included are two very early stories, `A Fish Like a Buzzard' and `Giant Turtle, Gliding in the Dark', which have not previously been published in book form. Southern Stories assembles the best of Clark Blaise's early work in one collection. His powerful writing is as relevant to our times now as it was when these stories first appeared. Included here are stories from A North American Education, Tribal Justice, Man and His World and Resident Alien.
`As novelist Fenton Johnson notes in the introduction to this book, Blaise's portrayal of a dirt-poor South haunted by history
belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. What needs to be
added is that this Southern Gothic tradition has tendrils that reach all the way up to Canada. Aside from Blaise, there
have been many reverse carpetbaggers, Southerners who have headed (or returned) north such as Leon Rooke, Douglas
Fetherling and Elizabeth Spencer. Moreover, many prototypically Canadian writers such as Alice Munro learned their craft
at the feet of Southern masters. Like the American South, Canada has been a poor, rural land suspicious of outsiders and technological
progress for most of its history. It's no accident that at the end of the American Civil War, confederate leaders such as
Jefferon Davies ended up in Canada. Progressive and enlightened Canadians might not like to think so, but there is a deep
emotional affinity between Canada and the American South.'
- Jeet Heer, the National Post
`In less able hands, the stories might not rise above the typical male coming-of-age saga,
but Blaise turns the familiar territory of late childhood/early pubescence - with its obsession with status, identity,
and women's breats - into a series of almost allegorical explorations of adult initiation rites. Blaise's narrators,
perpetual outsiders in a Southern culture that has changed little since the Civil War, observe rather than join their host
society, and their passage into adulthood is marked by estrangement and mystery.'
- James Grainger, Quill & Quire
`Canadian Blaise (author of twelve previous books, including Lusts and If I Were
Me) gathers thirteen early short stories, all set in the grim, steaming poverty of
north-central Florida in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Autobiographical in
inspiration, they reflect Blaise's own childhood as an intelligent child of Canadian
parents struggling to make their way in a world of rednecks, migrant workers,
tarpaper shacks, swamps, and privation. Carefully worded and beautifully
constructed, these tales reveal Blaise's talent as a storyteller, as well as his
dark view of human nature. In `A Fish Like a Buzzard,' two quarrelsome young
brothers go fishing on a Florida lake, but only one may come back. In `A
North American Education,' a father takes his son to a county fair peep show to
teach him about sex, but the lesson has unpleasant consequences. `The Fabulous
Eddie Brewstera', a clever story of clouded family loyalty, suspicion and
wartime secrets, is one of the collection's strongest. Entries tell of infidelity,
racism and religious intolerance -- of a boy's deep and inexplicable admiration
for his father, driven by "blind lusts," and a family's betrayal and their
subsequent retreat to escape their failure and humiliation. Though Blaise's
volume is a superb example of controlled, elegant writing, readers should not
expect to find many moments of humor or happiness. As Johnson notes in his
introduction, "an open-ended terror underlies these stories" [and] "the characters
never fully comprehend the forces that have been brought to bear upon them." '
- Publishers' Weekly
`Clark Blaise is a born storyteller ... a writer to savour.'
- The New York Times Book Review
Photo by Emma Dodge Hanson